Some Thoughts on Remote Gaming

We've now had a few sessions of the campaign run remotely. It has actually worked quite well. A few thoughts...

1. We're not using any sort of a virtual tabletop. This means that we're not exposed to any of the things that they can do for you... but it also means we're not tempted to be dazzled by the technology either. My feeling is that for a 'real' campaign run online, I would probably want to at least look into some of those options.
   
2. Because we don't have shared online dice rollers (because of the absence of a VTT), it's important that I'm able to trust my players. But these days my policy is that I won't game with people I don't trust, so that's probably a non-issue.
   
3. The big difficulty comes when multiple people talk at once. Conversely, there's a risk that the conversation be dominated by one or two big personalities. (In a physical game, I would try to deliberately engage anyone who looked left out. Virtually, that works much less well.) So it's important to be extra-mindful of such things.
   
4. The meeting invitation allows for various things to be attached. This has been generally useful, and made up for some of the lack from not having a VTT.

Other than that, though, it has pretty much just felt like a game, just being run remotely. I'm rather surprised how little difference that it seems to have made. Which, under the circumstances, is very nice.

That said, my feeling is that once this is all over and done with, we'll revert back to face-to-face gaming, and I don't envisage doing lots of additional online gaming as a consequence of this. But this all does raise at least one interesting possibility that might be worth looking in to...